Call for Help - Shadowrun Identity Project

rank: Innocent Bystander

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Dear fellow shadowrunners and gamemasters, this is a general invitation to join our community-made 100+ hour Shadowrun Returns campaign project, Shadowrun Identity, using the official 1E and 2E sourcebooks and adventures to recreate the world of the 2050s, month by month, year by year. We have already received a great deal of encouragement and support from some of the original writers of the early Shadowrun materials, like Thumper, and the HBS staff, especially Brian and Robin. With your help, we can make this project a reality and add some top-shelf content to the SRR game.

Thanks to Loseriffic, you can see a Let's Play video of Life on a Limb, our first Shadowrun Identity Content Pack, on YouTube at:

To join, please reply to this post, PM me, or email opifer@gmail.com with your online handle/tag, email address, and which individual Shadowrun Identity mission appeals to you the most and/or what role (Project Lead, Map Designer, or Scripter) you would like to play.

For everyone not able or interested in contributing to the growth of our Shadowrun Identity campaign, we hope you enjoy playing it and please let us know when you find bugs so we can squash them!

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

Welcome to the project and here's introducing the team, all 66 of us and counting! This is the first Project Update (along the lines of the Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter Updates you backers have been receiving) with four items on the agenda:

1) We are maintaining a master list of contact information for all our teammates. Please join our project to gain access to this list and contact your fellow GMs.

2) The Shadowrun Identity website is now more or less text-complete with write-ups for all 120 episodes, each one to be a User-Generated Content (UGC) content pack created by GMs like you. I can't do this alone so a sincere thank you for your help and please spread the word!

3) The Let's Play of Shadowrun Identity: Life on a Limb now has over 40,000 views and is the number one news item for Google searches on Shadowrun Returns. Hopefully this boosts sales and gets us more content from HBS. Loserific has also posted a third episode in which he kills me. If any of you (looking at you McDougle and Johnny Memphis) have Early Access, please do a Let's Play of Life on a Limb (Screen-Cast-O-Matic makes it easy). More exposure can only help Shadowrun Returns sales when it releases in two weeks' time!

4) Finally, I am putting the Sprawl Sites encounters into Life on a Limb one at a time (there's more than 130 of them). You are of course more than welcome to put them into your own creations as well if you like. But if you'd like to help me add them to Life on a Limb, please email me directly and I'll let you know which ones I have outstanding. You can write a branching conversation tree for the encounter and I'll put it in the game.

Thanks a million! That pretty much sums it up! Arigato and just a couple more weeks to go until release!

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

Shadowrun Identity Project Update #2: A Little Help from our Friends at HBS!

Hoi Shadowrun Identity GM chummers!

We're closing in on release day now with less than a week to go until Shadowrun Returns is a reality for us all. When the original Kickstarter was launched a year ago this seemed like such an impossibility and I'm so glad the team at HBS was able to make this happen! So, appropriately, for our second Identity project update, we're featuring an invitation from Brian at HBS, along with a few other agenda items:

1) Brian Poel, Producer, Metrics Analyst & Game Designer for Shadowrun Returns, reached out to us last week to say that "the Identity project is pretty amazing. Kudos to you for helping make that happen! I'm wondering if you would like to arrange for a web conference Q&A some time after launch -- try to gather all of your GMs together and we'll do a little web-cast conference call kind of thing and I can try to answer questions." So, this sounds like a great idea to me, and I hope you guys are all interested! Now all we have to do is a pick a date and a format. Maybe Saturday, August 10 or Sunday, Aug. 11? And would Skype be best for this kind of thing?

2) The Shadowrun Identity website now features a section for characters. I am including all joinable companion NPCs from Life on a Limb. They each have multiple, unique conversations and will eventually all have "finisher" quests for extra Karma and to cement your relationship with the NPC (at which point you can choose to let them hang out at home where it's safe so they are sure to survive to the next content pack or continue to accompany you and risk life and limb).

3) The Let's Play of Shadowrun Identity: Life on a Limb now has nearly 70,000 views and Loserific has released an Episode 6 in which he actually starts to slow down a little, pay attention and read the text!

4) Finally, I would like to stress that in addition to using the same pool of companion NPCs we can also duplicate each other's maps, building a virtual Seattle block by block, building interior by Stuffer Shack and Renraku lab interior, gang base by gang base. So long as you select other Shadowrun Identity content packs as dependencies, you will have access to all the same quest items and story variables you need to ensure that playing through the content packs, even out of order, jumping in and out of each with the same PC, still feels like a contiguous world and a continuous experience for players. That goes double for all the official maps that will be released with the Dead Man's Switch Campaign, giving us a core of the Seattle Metroplex on day 1!

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

Hey Opifer, I'm a longtime SR GM and am interested in this project, cause it just so happens I'm running my VT 3rd edition group through 2054 and the old adventures. They just finished the first half of DNA DOA. Also I've read practically all of the novels and use to build/do GM runs on a SR3 MUD so I know how to link things together. Granted I'll need another 48 hours to get my hands on the game and editor but I'd be down for joining the team if you want me.

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

hey opifer,
lot of winey sorts on steam re no manual save.....
does the editor give the posibility of placing say a 'terminal' ..... interaction/event/trigger.......
to que a save in a given scene... if that makes sense???

im guessing the save at scene transition could be qued to such a thing.... Y/N???

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score: 10

Hello Opifer, not sure if I can help but I would sure love to. I am an all around developer, I mainly like to code, but every now and then modelling, graphics, or web design are a nice break from the norm... I know a few programming languages, been using photoshop/dreamweaver/flash for over 13yrs (most of this stuff since its beta or original releases)... I could see myself as a mapper or a scripter for one of these projects, I would love to be lead on something smaller maybe as I have not read the books, just been a die hard fan of the whole shadowrun universe since I played Shadowrun for SEGA genesis back in the 90's. Let me know if I might be someone you'd like to have on the team.

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score: 10

Are the PCs that run through this project going to be continuous from story to story? In other words, if I make a character for Life on a Limb, will I be using that same character for "Into the Shadows" or "Sprawl Law"? I read that each team has the ability to do that, but what I'm asking is if doing so will be common, or will you basically have to make a new character every single story?

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score: 10

@Zanzo Awesome news, man. I have just the module for you (it's a good one - especially having played some of Dead Man's Switch).

@Scholar Most of the Identity GMs are allowing you to use the same player character in each episode. We are also developing a shared pool of NPCs called Cast of Shadows. In certain content packs (such as some of the ones based on novels) you will play the protagonist as the default character. Finally, making a new character is an option if your current PC has out-levelled the content and you want a challenge. Or just fighting the King in Life on a Limb. It's not unwinnable but sometimes it feels that way. Optional boss battle at any rate ...

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I ran a semi-casual 2e campaign that lasted for eight years - by the end the PCs were all horribly OP but we still had a blast. Anywho, just wanted to let you that this project of yours has upgraded this game from a 'looks cool' to a 'must buy' in my book.

Keep up the good work! In the meantime, I'll just sit here patiently awaiting news on Dreamchipper, Imago, or Bottled Demon (my personal favorite modules)

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score: 10

Hope you're having fun with the game! Your creativity and enthusiasm are essential to the development of our community-made campaign and I want to thank you for playing the game, familiarizing yourselves with the editor, and brainstorming on our Google+ Hangouts and on the forums. I can't wait to see what you are able to do with the editor. I'm sure much of what you produce will eventually rival or exceed what we are playing in Dead Man's Switch. Sharing recurring NPCs and maps with you all will be incredibly fun as we bring the Sixth World to life on our computers! A few items on today's agenda:

Brian Poel, Executive Producer with HBS, is stoked that we have assembled such an international team of dedicated and knowledgeable GMs. He is asking for RSVP signups for the following two webconference slots to get all your burning questions about the editor answered so we can focus on producing amazing content. RSVP by email to me (opifer@gmail.com) and Brian (brian@hbs-studios.com) [be sure to cc us both] to sign up for one or both of the following times:

Time Slot A) Saturday, August 24 at 9:00am (Seattle time). This is 6:00pm in Berlin (Sat, 24th) and 2:00am in Sydney (Sun, 25th).

and/or

Time Slot B) Saturday, August 24 at 9:00pm (Seattle time). This is 6:00am in Berlin (Sun, 25th) and 2:00pm (Sun, 25th) in Sydney.

After you sign up, Brian will announce the format (software) for the web-conference.

We are now up to 75 GMs after some pre-release attrition and post-release interest from players around the world. To have full teams on each UGC project, we need 360 GMs. So please spread the word on the forums (Steam and Shadowrun.com) and the internet generally (Reddit, maybe?) about our Shadowrun Identity project. Give people the link to our website (www.shadowrunidentity.org) and encourage them to reach out to me at opifer@gmail.com for an official invite.

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score: 10

I think I might be interested in helping out with the project as a project lead or scripter for the next open module slot, but I want to take some to time to get familiar with the toolset for a while first. I'm going over tutorials and checking things out at the moment.

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

I would love to get involved in this but time is a huge factor which i just don;t have a lot of right now. I even looked and Wolf and Raven is open. That I think presents some creation challenges by the nature of the story and its one of my favs....sigh

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score: 10

I would love to get involved in this. I'm still getting my head wrapped around the editor - as I think most are at this point - but I would definitely be up for working on an available module either as project lead or scripter.

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

rank: Innocent Bystander

score: 10

To get accustomed with the editor, I started modeling some areas from Sprawl Sites (literally just started with the small/medium bank and body shop - no matrix areas, yet).
If they turn out halfway decent, I will put them on the workshop as a resource content pack.

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score: 10

Since I am a total noob at legal stuff - how far into copyright issues are we allowed to move by adapting the old adventures into SR:R?
With that I am talking about the description text, dialogue, characters, etc.

It would just be a shame to see a lot of work go into this and then some cease and desist note flying in at some later stage.
If I missed some FAQ on this, please consider my head lowered in shame - hoping to get pointed at it.